I then had really led her from the earthly to the spiritual and holy. Her heart had unawares entertained an angel visitant; mine had unconsciously performed an angel's ministry; I, next to God and his messengers, had power to satisfy the deepest wants of her nature. Oh, solitary drop of consolation! The love cherished by her, and her heart's mistaken choice, was only of this _earth_; there was no element of spirituality to render it _immortal_. It was doomed to die with the passion that gave it birth, and from the grave there should be no resurrection. Blessed be God forever!... Lo! The rustic church is trimmed with evergreen, and lighted for the marriage service. Curious lookers on are there; and with that perverse desire to test the might of their endurance, common with those who suffer, I too, am there, though I know that her image, as she stands at the altar, where I shall see her for the last time, through the days and nights of anguish sure to follow _this_, will be ever present with me! Yet, with my face half hidden by the evergreens, I stand and wait her coming. They enter, bride and bridegroom; she leaning trustfully upon his arm. O Jennie! _my_ Jennie; thou who shouldst have been my bride! Great waves of tearless anguish rolled over my soul at the sight! Jennie, the priest who ministers at the altar before which thou standest, is idly repeating words whose holy meaning he does not comprehend: is _separating_, not _uniting_ those whom God has joined together. O Jennie! companion of my spirit! is there no far-off, distant echo awakened in thy soul by the bitter waves of anguish surging over mine? Not now, in this thine hour of earthly love and triumph; not now. Even in spirit, 'lover and friend,' hast thou been put far from me. The low, measured tones of the minister fall on my ear; and I count the brief moments that give her to the keeping of another for all her _mortal_ life, as the watcher counts the last moments of the dying and the loved. They kneel in prayer before the mockery of those last words is spoken, and I kneel too, crying to the Almighty: 'Wrest even now my treasure from him, or still the anguished throbbings of my heart forever! Let me die!' O Thou tempted in all points even as we, yet without sin, it was meet in this my hour of extremest suffering, that Thou shouldst send the promised comforter, not to bestow the earthly good I prayed for, but to raise me above earth and all of earthly good. Opening my inner vision to behold, far as the eye of the finite may behold, what is comprehended in the omniscient glance of the Infinite--removing the clouds brooding so darkly over my spirit, and filling it with holy joy, by imparting radiant glimpses of the soul's calmer and higher life in the land beyond--'the life that rights the wrongs, and reveals the mysteries of this,'--the words that were once my hope and the inspiration of my toil, came now, when that hope was dead,